Life Sciences Firms Call Southern I-495 Home
Photos/Matt Pilon
Harvard Bioscience's headquarters in Holliston's New England Industrial Park, Tegra Medical's Franklin headquarters in Forge Park and Ipsen's Biomeasure facility in Milford, which will be sold later this year to an Illinois pharmaceutical company.
Photos/Courtesy
These images show an HBIO employee seeding a man-made trachea with a patient’s stem cells. The cell growth shown in the final image is after only several days.
Silicon Valley has its thriving technology sector. Now, the southern region of I-495 is creating a hotbed of innovation in the life sciences and medical manufacturing. In Franklin, Milford and Holliston, the following three firms are chasing markets worth a combined $270 billion in the United States alone; the markets are even bigger worldwide. One in particular, Holliston's Harvard Bioscience, is hoping that the tiny regenerative medicine market takes off in the coming years as the science evolves.
Grabbing Headlines, Profits
Founded in 1901, Harvard Bioscience (HBIO) is playing a critical role in constructing something its founder Dr. William Porter could only have imagined — a man-made trachea.
Indeed, HBIO has certainly come a long way from its humble beginnings in the bowels of the Harvard Medical School, where Porter began manufacturing his own line of physiology teaching equipment.
Today, the Holliston-based, publicly-traded company remains a profitable maker manufacturer of life sciences research tools.
It brought in a record $108 million in revenue in each of its last two fiscal years and as of the third quarter, is slightly ahead of that pace, at $82.9 million.
But even so, it's HBIO's much smaller regenerative medicine division that tends to grab all the headlines.
For instance, last summer, doctors in Russia performed the world's first two man-made trachea transplants. The plastic tracheas were seeded with stem cells from the two patients; HBIO's InBreath bioreactors were used to grow the cells into tissue before the surgeries.
The company's trachea transplant product remains in clinical trials, but its executives hope to one day grow more complex organs, like lungs, heart valves, and even a heart.
Last December, the HBIO announced its intention to spin off its regenerative medicine division — known as Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology — via a $20-million IPO. According to officials, the decision was due to the increasing difficulty in managing its two divisions under one company.
Harvard Bioscience, which would retain 80 percent of HART and distribute the remaining shares to Harvard Bioscience shareowners, says the move will allow each entity to focus on its core business and markets.
Tegra Medical: Guiding Device Development
Tegra Medical in Franklin has been providing machining and contract manufacturing services to the medical device industry since its founding in late 2007.
But Tegra, which was formed through the merger of four companies between 2007 and 2009 led by Boston-based Riverside Partners LLC, has a history that goes back much further than that.
Riverside and senior management combined Holliston-based New England Precision Grinding, Rhode Island-based Accu-Met Laser and Dartmouth-based American Medical Instruments in 2007. Two years later, Missouri-based contract manufacturer CTW Inc. was acquired by the group.
Tegra focuses solely on the medical device industry, both producing tried and true products for medical device companies and also helping some develop devices from prototype or planning stages.
Examples of devices Tegra makes at its four facilities — including its 81,000-square-foot headquarters in MetroWest — include needles, titanium spine implants, guide wires and components for sutures and catheters.
Tegra now boasts 200,000 square feet of modern manufacturing space in four locations. In addition to locations in Franklin, Dartmouth and Hernando, Mo., the company acquired a manufacturing operation in Costa Rica in the summer of 2010.
Over the summer, Tegra further solidified its leadership team by announcing Robert Pietrafesa as its new president and CEO. An industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience, Pietrafesa had previously served as president of the InterV Division of Angiotech Pharmaceuticals. During the past three years, that firm's revenues tripled and operating income increased by a whopping 500 percent.
Like many other medical device companies, Tegra has anticipated a recently enacted federal tax on medical devices makers.
"In general, even before the medical device tax, we have had ongoing dialogues with many of our customers about ways to manufacture their products more efficiently and cost effectively while always maintaining the highest levels of quality," said Wally Gacek, Tegra's vice president for business development. "With the new medical device tax, there is an increased urgency and focus on these types of activities as cost pressures are felt not only by the device manufacturers themselves, but throughout the entire supply chain."
Ipsen's Biomeasure Sold To Massive Health Care Co.
It's certainly been a busy few months for Ipsen, a French biopharmaceutical company with a subsidiary in Milford called Biomeasure.
After unveiling then abandoning plans for a $42-million expansion of its Milford facility, the French biotech firm and its strategic partner, Inspiration Biopharmaceuticals of Cambridge, announced in January the sale of their hemophilia drug program and Biomeasure facility. The buyer? Illinois-based Baxter International, in a deal that could be worth as much as $700 million. The asset sale came as part of Inspiration's ongoing bankruptcy proceedings.
The sale marks the end of Ipsen's 20-plus-year presence in Milford, where it employed approximately 150 people.
Baxter did not return a call seeking comment, but a company spokesman told the Milford Daily News recently that the company expects the facility to remain active if the sale is ultimately approved.
As a part of the asset sale, Baxter will obtain worldwide rights to OBI-1, a "recombinant porcine factor VIII in development for congenital hemophilia A with inhibitors and acquired hemophilia A."
OBI-1 is currently in a pivotal trial for the treatment of individuals with acquired hemophilia A.
"Baxter has a long commitment to hemophilia and we are excited that they will be using their expertise to bring this innovative therapy to people who currently have limited treatment options," said John Butler, Inspiration's CEO, in an announcement about the sale.
Ipsen asked Milford selectmen in December to decertify its tax incentive financing agreement that had been approved over the summer. The Biomeasure facility is assessed at $5.1 million. Ipsen had planned to roughly double its size with a 60,000-square-foot expansion.
According to Louis Celozzi, Milford town administrator, the TIF agreement would have provided tax exemptions on incremental increases in the value of the newly constructed building area, starting with a 70-percent exemption in year one of the 10-year agreement.
It's unclear if Baxter would expand the property, as Ipsen had intended.
"The expected 20 new jobs will obviously now not be created unless a new owner proposes their own expansion," Celozzi said. n
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